Here are some interesting excerpts from an address to the Texas Secession Convention from a commissioner sent from Louisiana (which is where I am from):
>>Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery . . . . Louisiana supplies to Texas a market for her surplus wheat, grain and stock; both States have large areas of fertile, uncultivated lands, peculiarly adapted to slave labor; and they are both so deeply interested in African slavery that it may be said to be absolutely necessary to their existence, and is the keystone to the arch of their prosperity. . . . The people of Louisiana would consider it a most fatal blow to African slavery, if Texas either did not secede or having seceded should not join her destinies to theirs in a Southern Confederacy. If she remains in the union the abolitionists would continue their work of incendiarism and murder. Emigrant aid societies would arm with Sharp's rifles predatory bands to infest her northern borders. . . . I am authorized to say to your honorable body that Louisiana does not expect any beneficial result from the peace conference now assembled at Washington. She is
unwilling that her action should depend on the border States. Her interests are identical with Texas and the
seceding States. With them she will at present co-operate, hoping and believing in his own good time God will
awaken the people of the border States to the vanity of asking for, or depending upon, guarantees or compromises
wrung from a people whose consciences are too sublimated to be bound by that sacred compact, the constitution of the late United States. That constitution the Southern States have never violated, and taking it as the basis of our new government we hope to form a slave-holding confederacy that will secure to us and our remotest posterity the great blessings its authors designed in the Federal Union. With the social balance wheel of slavery to regulate its machinery, we may fondly indulge the hope that our Southern government will be perpetual. <<
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